Lies and regrets
Mornings are one of my favorite times of day. I get up at 5:30 so I can can have a quiet hour to myself in the house before anyone else wakes up. I have my coffee. I read. Sometimes I write. At 6:30, I take Ruby out for a walk, and typically listen to a podcast as we do laps around our cookie cutter suburban neighborhood before the sun comes up.
This morning, my book reading was Martha Beck’s The Way of Integrity. I’ve been taking this one slowly, because on nearly every page there’s something I need to absorb, reread, ponder, work through. In Chapter 9 or 10, she talks about how the most harmful kinds of lies—harmful to our own wellbeing—are the ones we tell ourselves. So I started writing a list of things I’ve been lying about to myself. I’m not ready to share it here yet. It’s raw, and I’m confused by a lot of it, and I need more time to process where some of it came from. Some of the lies I know are true. Others, I’m having a harder time discerning whether they’re really mine, or they’re feelings and beliefs I’ve co-opted from our culture. But regardless of all that, suffice it to say, it was heavy.
There’s a strange kind of release that I get by doing heavy heart work. Or maybe not so strange, because Beck also talks about how lying actually takes a physical toll on our bodies and our overall wellbeing. Even little white lies have an adverse effect, like telling a friend you can’t go out tonight because your kid is sick…when really you just don’t feel like putting-on real pants and making small talk over an overpriced cocktail. (What, me? Never.) I guess with that context, it makes sense that writing down some of my deepest, most personal, and most vulnerable lies on paper would provide some sort of spiritual relief. It also scares the shit out of me.
So back to my morning. I spent an hour reading and unearthing a bunch of scary maybe-truths by confessing my possible-lies, to myself, while sitting in bed with half a cup of coffee and a cat on my feet. By 6:30 I was emotionally confused, but also kind of at ease, and it was time to walk Rubes. Some mornings we just wander and talk (I do most of the talking), and I forego listening to one of my favorite podcasts till later. This morning, though, I was so excited that Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast was back (she’d paused her podcasts for a bit while trying to make sense of the Spotify/Joe Rogan/misinformation controversy) that I immediately started listening to her latest episode. She was talking to Dan Pink, who just came out with his latest book, The Power of Regret. I’ll confess that right off the bat, I wasn’t stoked about this episode. I’d tried to read Pink’s When, which many people I know absolutely loved, and I just couldn’t get into it. I also felt like Pink himself was a bit of a showman in his presence, but I love and respect Brené, so I kept listening. And holy shit, thank god/goodness/the cosmos I did.
For much of the beginning of the episode, Pink and Brown (there’s humor there that I’m not going to touch) were talking about how previous academic and social research on the topic of regret hadn’t really been sufficient. Surveys and studies had been done, but they’d always categorized people’s regrets into neat little packages: regrets about romance, career, friends, finance, etc. Pink believed those were only surface level categorizations. He did his own research—both qualitative and quantitative—and found that while there are thousands of individual kinds of, and reasons for, regret, there was one universal truth emerged below nearly every single instance.
At exactly 27:35 into the episode—I know this because I Slacked the timecode and the quote to myself (yes, this is what I’ve come to these days)—he got at the heart of what that universal truth was.
Underneath all regrets, whether it’s the regret of not studying abroad during college, not asking someone out, not quitting a job to start a business, not speaking up, not saying yes, not saying no…underneath all of them is one core human regret:
“If only I’d taken the chance.”
Six words. If only I’d taken the chance.
That phrase resonated with me in a way that felt like a surge of floodwaters rushed through my body from my head to my toes. I almost saw it as I was feeling it: the gates of some invisible dam opened over my head and a rush as powerful as a waterfall cascaded through me. It literally stopped me in my tracks. I don’t know that I’ve ever had this kind of visceral, full-bodied, EMbodied response to anything so clearly or forcefully.
The dam broke.
The floodwaters came.
I stopped.
I rewound. (Rewinded?)
I re-listened.
I shuddered.
I wrote it down.
I was still processing the expunging of my most personal lies, but I was also starting to wrestle with the regrets that Pink also called “failures of boldness.” And this was all before 7am.
A few interesting things came together for me as I re-composed myself, kept on listening, and walked the rest of the way back home.
We may regret doing or saying things that feel wrong, but we also regret not doing or saying things that feel right.
I didn’t regret writing down the lies I’d just admitted to myself an hour earlier, which meant maybe there was some truth in at least a few of them.
I thought about how lies and regrets are intimately connected. Maybe lies are what actually what lead to regrets. If we lie about being happy in a relationship or a job…then when we don’t take action to find a better situation, we’re committing a failure of boldness. A lie of comfort and conformity. And there’s a good chance that turns into the regret of “if only I’d taken a chance” later on.
It’s 9:15am now, and I am at work, and it’s going to be difficult to focus on anything else besides truth and lies and regrets today. I still have 30 minutes more to go in the podcast, which I’ll listen to on my drive home later this afternoon. I have already placed a hold on The Power of Regret in my library app, but probably won’t be able to wait that long to read it, and will download the Kindle book next week. I fully plan on diving back into The Way of Integrity tomorrow morning, too. It’s odd to think about the fact that, despite how much inner work I’ve done these past few years, there is so much I don’t know about myself. I am not going to like all of it when I finally find out (or more likely, I already know it…I just haven’t admitted it to myself yet). But I don’t want to lie. I want to learn from my regrets. Why is being human so fucking complicated?
Maybe I’ll be ready to speak about my lies some point. But not yet. Probably not for a while. I can speak about some of my regrets, though.
I regret not studying abroad when I was in college, which is apparently one of the top four regrets of every American.
I regret not traveling more before having kids.
I regret putting my body through all sorts of shit because I was ashamed of it. Although maybe it’s only a half regret, because looking back, in that moment, I would probably do some of it again.
I regret not being more present at the hospital with my dad in his last few weeks. I was physically there, but I would work on presentation decks while he was sleeping, or duck out in the hallway for conference calls. Maybe I was afraid of being fully present. Or maybe my big-ass ego thought I really needed to keep working—that I was so important that my work would not continue if I wasn’t there. THAT’s as big of a self-lie as there is.
I DO NOT regret writing down all of my lies earlier, which maybe means that there’s truth in at least some of them.
There are more regrets, for sure. They’ll keep coming up. I’m really curious to dig into them more and see where my lies and regrets intersect. Everything intersects. Life is one giant intersection. Even when you decide to turn left, you’re still tethered to whatever was to the right, and in front of, and behind you.
One of my favorite songs in the world, which I listened to on endless repeat this last year, is “We can do hard things” by Tish Melton, Glennon Doyle’s daughter. There’s a line in there that goes “we stopped asking directions to places they’ve never been.”
No one knows where we’re going. No one’s ever been down our own unique path before. It’s got lies and regrets and truths and tears and pain and joy and everything in-between, in some cosmic order there’s no way to understand or predict. Maybe none of what we feel or encounter is inherently good or bad. Lies can be positive when you recognize them. Regrets can be teachers when you learn from them. Joy can be hard when you’re holding pain at the same time.
I don’t know what any of this means, but it’s what I feel right now. And that, right there, is a truth.